A Tough Town to Die In

Funerals are strange under the best of circumstances, and for New Orleans' prominent figures, they're even moreso. Danny Barker didn't want a jazz funeral when he died because they'd become such undignified affairs, and though efforts have been made to solemnize them, they're still pretty ratty. People filtered into the Howlin' Wolf during the service for Eaglin, many of them simply there for the second line. Rather than wearing something funereal, they were in T-shirts, cargo shorts, straw hats and athletic shoes. They were dressed for Jazz Fest, and no doubt many had sunscreen in their backpacks.

I don't think their motivations were callow, but I suspect they were a little remote - more connected with a general affection for New Orleans music than Snooks, and more into participating in a New Orleans ritual than in the sad passing of a musician.

This is the mixed blessing of Jazz Fest. One of its great successes has been to support and educate people about second line, jazz funeral and Mardi Gras Indian traditions. But, with that knowledge comes the cultural tourism of people who are barely connected to the death (in this case) joining a Jazz Fest-like event in a Jazz Fest-y way, and the inappropriateness of their wardrobe is lost on them.

In most ways, Eaglin's funeral was a good funeral - a balance of spiritual consolation and good-humored remembrances. Irma Thomas sang three spirituals, and by the end, she had a vibe going with the woman playing organ so that the bar was rocking as if it were a church. Allen Toussaint and drumer James Jackson both confirmed the Eaglin tall tale that the blind guitarist once drove the band they were in, the Flamingos, home after a night when they all got too drunk.

And in death, some guys find their moment in the sun. Jackson stood with Eaglin's open casket for much of the time before the service started, took to the stage to introduce himself when the stage was made available, and when Toussaint spoke, he returned to his spot by Eaglin's casket as if the moment was a shared one. Who knows? Maybe Jackson was closer to Eaglin than any of us knew. Maybe his death spoke to him in a way that made him feel the importance of asserting his presence. I like to attribute positive motivations to people's behavior at funerals, even when I can't figure out what they are.

Miss Antoinette on the Baby Dolls

Gambit's Noah Bonaparte Pais has been blogging the transcripts of his investigation into the Mardi Gras tradition, the Baby Dolls. Today he posted the recollections of Antoinette K-Doe, who was a central figure in the revitalization of the practice. In the interview, she tells the story of last year's Mardi Gras heart attack:

Last year for Mardi Gras, I did not do it because I took a heart attack Mardi Gras Day. When I was getting dressed to go in the yard with my Baby Dolls, that’s when I told the girl that was on my bar, Jeannie — she was dressed as a Baby Doll — I said, “Jeannie, I believe I’ve taken a heart attack.” She said, “No, girl, you’re not.” I said, “Don’t tell me. Keep my bar open and call me an ambulance.” I had a nurse that knew me. I had her call back and tell Jeannie to keep my bar open, but tell any lie you wanted to tell. I didn’t want people to know I was in the hospital. I’m in the hospital with my Baby Doll clothes on. I tell the doctor, “I have to go home and get ready with the Indians and the Skeletons, because I need to go out with my Baby Dolls.” He said, “Young lady, you’re not going out. You’re going to surgery.”

Where We Are

[UPDATE BELOW]

My piece on the state of musicians in New Orleans and the efforts get them home and working is up at RollingStone.com. One note - in the editing process, the reference was lost to ATC and FMC, Air Traffic Control and the Future of Music Coalition respectively. They organized the musician activist retreats that resulted in the Musicians Bringing Musicians Home benefits.

Update 1:58 p.m. - I asked Damian Kulash of OK Go for a comment for the piece, particularly on OK Go's efforts to help Al "Carnival Time" Johnson into a home. Their EP, efforts at fundraising and benefit concerts raised $44,000:

My thoughts on Al getting his home.... it’s wonderful. It’s incredibly gratifying to see something go right, one problem addressed. The sheer magnitude of the destruction and despair in the wake of Katrina were paralyzing, even for us — four guys who didn’t lose everything, who didn’t see our neighborhoods vanish, who didn’t lose close family or friends. So we decided to pick one discrete thing we could effect — in the middle of such a total clusterfuck, we chose one guy, one life, we could attempt to get back on track. As musicians we often have chances to spout off about our politics or our beliefs, but there’s rarely any demonstrable, direct outcome, and we wanted to be sure that whatever we did would make a real, measurable difference in someone else’s life. It was a way of making sure weren’t just easing our own anger and shame at the way our country and our government handled the disaster, but actually making a difference. And of course, as anyone who’s met Al can tell you, he’s an easy guy to be smitten with, an easy guy to look up to, and easy guy to want to help. So his house means a great deal to us.

Something Not to Do

Antoinette K-Doe passed away Monday night of a heart attack after finishing her shift at the Mother-in-Law Lounge. Word traveled quickly the next morning as people got ready for Mardi Gras, though WWL-TV couldn't even include it in the news crawl beneath the happy chatter of morning television.

The downside of dying on Lundi Gras is that you don't get the dignified treatment you want (or that I want, anyway). I went to the Mother-in-Law and there were no flowers because there are no florists open on Mardi Gras. Many of the people drinking on her patio had no idea who Antoinette was or that she'd died. Two guys tried to figure out "the song that goes, 'My big chief likes to party down.'" Others were there to pay their respects (some in a slightly theatrical manner) while her best friends ran around trying to find the toilet tissue and keep the bar open.

My recent tribute to Antoinette, who really was a beautiful person.

While Bobby Jindal's Making News ...

... as one of the Republican governors who've found a new way to fight the stimulus package - Louisiana unemployed be damned! - the news has largely been overlooked that the package only contains $3.8 billion for Louisiana, with none of it targeted specifically at hurricane recovery. Harry Shearer notes, ""Damn, three and a half years along, and we're not shovel-ready."

... and here's Jon Stewart's take on the governors who just say no.

Happy Mardi Gras.

Not Quite the Mardi-est of Gras

Mardi Gras seems a little run-of-the-mill this year, but it could just be me. No one around me is hot for it this year, so no one around me is ratcheting up any sense of excitement. For the most part, I've avoided or been able to avoid the sort of situations that imply great excitement - big crowds, severe traffic, and long lines. Only on Friday afternoon when I left work in the Quarter at 3:30 did I face major traffic hassles as I worked me way Uptown. Then again, perhaps it's just a sign of good planning that I can work around the places where I'd likely face lines and crowds. The parades aren't noticeably smaller or stingier, and the crowds are dense and nutty for beads.

I suspect my reaction's just another manifestation of Katrina working its way through the system. In 2006, Mardi Gras was thrilling because it happened at all, and the weather on Fat Tuesday was the best ever. In 2007, it was exciting to see Mardi Gras return to form. Krewes that teamed up to parade in 2006 were able to stand on their own again, and the schools had enough students to make their own marching bands. In 2008, Mardi Gras was in great shape - not just back, but back as we remember it pre-K. This year seems like more of that. No hallmarks to make it seem special after three years of Mardi Gras feeling special.

Or, maybe it's me.

I'm Stuck

I have Marnie Stern's This Is It ... in my iTunes file, and it has never held my attention, but each time I click on a track to make a final check before dumping it or moving it to a flash drive, I'm attracted to the brittle swirling guitar patterns and oddly shaped songs. I don't stay interested in the songs, though, and as I was typing this, I just lasted with a song from beginning to end: "Shea Stadium." I don't see that as a change in my relationship with the album, though.

Rush Hours

How you feel about Rush's Snakes & Arrows Live (Zoe DVD) has a lot to do with how you feel about Rush. I'm indifferent, but it's all well executed and I'd never think anyone goofy for being into it or them. I was more entertained by the odd attempts at humor, many of which struck me as successful. The stage set includes a row of rotisseries roasting chickens, and a row of Barbie doll groupies are propped up in front of guitarist Alex Lifeson's effects pedal board. Why? Because. The DVD begins with Lifeson's head in a suitcase made up like Jambi from Pee-Wee's Playhouse. One of the extras is a short film with Geddy Lee as a Scotsman that gives the barest of contexts for the stage oddities. It's all very Canadian and good-natured, borrowing from Monty Python and SCTV. Friends here found the insertion of Cartman's voice into the New Orleans show offputting, but for a band that is as humorless as Rush is in its music, such self-deprecating gestures are welcome.

Looking for a Job

Far be it from me to get too cranked by typos, but you'd think the publicist hyping the new album by Claudia Acuna on Marsalis Music would spell the name of the the label head correctly - Branford, not Brandford.

Snooks Eaglin

This afternoon, New Orleans blues guitarist Snooks Eaglin died. He had been in poor health. He was a truly idiosyncratic musical voice, and it is sad to lose it. More when I hear more.

Snooks on YouTube.

What We Want

The news channel talking heads and Republicans are saying we don't really want bipartisanship, and there may be something to that. At some level, "bipartisanship" means the other side agreeing with the side we support. But this morning on MSNBC's Morning Joe, the New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg suggested the term needs to be through further. He pointed out that Republican governors and numerous right-leaning business organizations supported the stimulus package. Does a measure have to get House and Senate Republicans' support to be bipartisan?

And I don't think voters want or expect easy agreement between Democrats and Republicans, but I suspect they're sick of the the reflexive "No" and tyranny of the minority.

Hertzberg was on MSNBC because of his provocative take on bipartisanship, which is well worth reading. I can give you the ending, but there's a lot of meat along the way that this doesn't hint at:

Fifty years ago, the civil-rights movement understood that nonviolence can be an effective weapon even if—or especially if—the other side refuses to follow suit. Obama has a similarly tough-minded understanding of the political uses of bipartisanship, which, even if it fails as a tactic for compromise, can succeed as a tonal strategy: once the other side makes itself appear intransigently, destructively partisan, the game is half won. Obama is learning to throw the ball harder. But it’s not Rovian hardball he’s playing. More like Gandhian hardball.

What Do You Say ...?

... about a CD when the first song rhymes "heart" with "a real fine place to star-ar-ar-ar-art," and the fractured syllables aren't melissmatic; they're closer to a bark. And the song builds to the realization that the singer-songwriter in question likes to be free. It's the work of a local who likely has found someone with money to turn her coffeehouse strum songs into piano ballads, breathy voice and all. Is it kinder to pretend it didn't exist and move on, to anatomize her failures of art and taste, or to say banal niceties and let time and cosmos handle this one.

It's tempting to go with the latter, but American Idol's tryout weeks are loaded with people who likely received that sort of reception for the duration of their singing careers, and it's only when they tryout that they discover they're not the stars-to-be they thought they were. And they respond with angry denial. Simon, Randy and Paula don't know music; their churches and family members and friends and lawyers know music.

A Chilly Dance

Junior Boys: Begone Dull Care (Domino): By the Junior Boys' standards, Begone Dull Care is almost tropical in its warmth. By anyone else's, this is dance music colored in shades of metallic gray. Since it borrows heavily from soul, disco and house, maybe there's a muted sepia in the palate somewhere. Singer Jeremy Greenspan's attempts at soulful vocals are soulful in the way many British new wave singers were, which is to say, not very. But performing as an uncertain, fundamentally reserved lover man gives the songs heart, anyway, and the songs are uniformly engaging. More impressive is that the hooks don't wear out despite the songs' usually five-plus minute lengths.

Ditto

From Pretty Goes With Pretty:

One thing I've noticed: that Animal Collective album has all but evaporated from my mind. Though I think it's terrific, I have virtually no craving for it.

My experience exactly. I keep meaning to write about it and enjoy it when I hear it, but it has yet to motivate me to focus my thoughts on it, and I only listen to it when I'm scanning through my iTunes to see what's there.

Two Questions

I just got a press release stating that Limp Bizkit reunited.
1) Did anybody really ask for this? Really?
2) The press release starts: "The original line-up of Limp Bizkit is back, do you believe in miracles? If so, then you can believe Limp Bizkit is back to do it ALL again! Album! Tour! Worldwide!" Aren't we lowering the bar for miracles here?

Grouse du Jour

I never thought I'd be nostalgic for the days when Bruce Springsteen agonized over albums for years before releasing them. They may have lumbered with portentiousness, but at least they were more interesting than Working on a Dream. The early albums interested me as he mythologized youth, and I understand there coming a day when he couldn't believe in those myths anymore. But his best music deals with myths - confronting them on Born in the U.S.A. - or inhabiting new ones on his folkier efforts including The Seeger Sessions. Singing conventional rock songs about the conventional thoughts of a man in his late 50s makes him, well, conventional. And really - it sounds like he's trying too hard.

What Am I Missing?

In his defense of the proposed TicketMaster-Live Nation merger, Live Nation president Michael Rapino said:

"Let's make sure we send a strong message from the first investor call. . . . There's no way around it, we've got to build a better mousetrap to compete in today's times."

Compete with whom?

EP du Jour

Hot Chip with Robert Wyatt and Geese (DFA/EMI): In the Year of the Autotune, an EP of fragile songs made more delicate and emotional by layers of Robert Wyatt's voice seems miraculous and absurdly retro. But Wyatt remains aesthetically contemporary (or maybe just outside time) and his fragile whistling, his melancholy cornet and ghostly held notes make these fundamentally electric songs warm and personal. And when he wants to screw with his voice, the hell with AutoTune - he opts for a jaw's harp.

More Girl Trouble and a WTF

At the Grammys, Whitney Houston remains sad and pathetic. A bad wig, bad plastic surgery, and bad brain.

... and seriously - is the only way New Orleans musicians can get on the Grammys is as Katrina victims? Lil Wayne had the top selling album of the year and won Grammys for "Lollipop" and "A Milli," but instead he performs the middling, Katrina-themed "Tie My Hands" as part of a medley with Allen Toussaint and the Dirty Dozen with Terence Blanchard. As it went on, the backdrop showed pictures of flooding, as if the waters just receded and we're still just drying out. We're not Jerry's Kids, and the implication that we're only of interest as the survivors of a catastrophe is really insulting. And if they're going to treat us as poor, wounded souls, show our actual damage as it exists today.

Girl Trouble

I loved M.I.A. appearing very pregnant in a notice-my-pregnancy outfit, and was grossed out by the Grammy producers' obvious discomfort with her pregnancy as the camera got away from her as quickly as possible.

And Katy Perry's performance settled the question of "I Kissed a Girl"'s nature (if a question still existed). As she and hot girls danced around each other, she presented the notion of women kissing as a Howard Stern fantasy.

... and he's not a woman, so technically, he doesn't belong in this post, but what was up with McCartney's hair color? When you're in your 60s and your hair is suddenly darker than the Jonas Brothers', you've chosen a shade too dark.

Song du Jour

The Bran Flakes' "Stumble Out of Bed": After the Avalanches and Girl Talk, most sample-oriented music seems to lack ambition, but this manipulation of Dolly Parton's "9 to 5" replicates the plight of the working man as it struggles to get words out and move the song forward while the DJ keeps backing him up. The forward/backward movement becomes an agreeable groove before there's a genuine interruption - the Osmonds' meditation on freedom in "Think" - and "you speak of freedom / as if it's just a word" seems to give the song the impetus to make it to the chorus. Who expected saving wisdom from the Osmonds?

C'est Rock et Roll

A Cross the Universe, the Justice DVD of its North American tour, shows the band applying the same arena rock aesthetics to touring that they apply to their music. Guns, girls, boffing on the bus and drinking in the chapel - it's all here, along with a bus driver with a voice like Clu Gallagher and audiences that react like Justice is Led Zeppelin.

Faubourg Treme

Tonight at 7 CST, PBS airs Faubourg Treme: the Untold Story of Black New Orleans. Whether you're interested in New Orleans or not, the documentary by Lolis Eric Elie and Dawn Logsdon is worth watching because it fills out the outline version of the story of blacks in America - slavery, Reconstruction, Civil Rights movement. Parts of the New Orleans experience took place in many American cities, and even if it didn't, Faubourg Treme suggests that what actually happened to African Americans was more complex than such a simple narrative would suggest.

The one curious factor today is the roll of Hurricane Katrina in the documentary's narrative. Katrina frames the story of Elie moving into the Treme and "investing in his history," he says. The efforts to renovate his house are analogous to the documentary's efforts to reconstruct a meaningful history for a neighborhood that had come to be associated with drugs. Katrina literally interrupted all the processes, and some of the documentary's footage was lost in the post-flood heat and funk.

Katrina as a framing device now serves as a giant neon date stamp on Faubourg Treme. Documentaries on the city shot in 2006 all employed it to some extent, and long, lingering shots of devastation that once seemed so important now feel a part of another consciousness. The flood doesn't stop seeming incomprehensible, and dead bodies left unattended remain brutal reminders of what happened, but such shots now are reminders of the emotionally naked city we were at that time. I think my anxiety about the city being abandoned by the country is written into most of my writing from 2006, and what makes Chris Rose's One Dead in the Attic is that you can tell he's writing out of desperation and grief that he's struggling to get a grip on. Gestures that would seem artlessly big and broad under other circumstances seemed perfectly appropriate, and they were. But those gestures also pin the writing, music and filmmaking to their moment.

Now I see the flood sequences and the hurricane as frame and I don't experience Katrina Exhaustion, but a response to Katrina that wouldn't be made today. Katrina remains an event that divides all of our lives into pre- and post-, and one of the interesting facets of the post-K story is how it settles into our consciousness, and how we incorporate it into our lives. I wonder what people from outside New Orleans will see, and to what extent the pre- and post-Katrina experience is shared by the rest of the country.

Favorite Song of the Day

Today I'm nutty about the Junior Boys' stripped-down take on '80s pop-funk on "Hazel" from its new album, Begone Dull Care. They test their funk to see how few notes it needs to groove and find that a few properly timed hold-and-release chords do most of the work.

A Time When Things Worked

The Cramps were playing Larry's Hideaway in Toronto in the mid-1980s, and it was so crowded that anybody who wasn't immediately in front of the stage had to stand on their cocktail tables to see, reaching up to the low ceiling to steady themselves. While Ivy retuned after breaking a string, people shouted requests. Lux responded, "Maybe" to each request until I barked out "Drug Train." He said, "Okay" and they rolled straight into it.

I never saw a bad Cramps show, and any event touched by the Cramps turned entertainingly strange. When I tried to photograph them at the Concert Hall in Toronto, a phalanx of people 5 and a half feet tall and shorter formed around me to keep me from being jostled. After a friend's girlfriend paied our bar tab at one club, she took us to Nuts and Bolts, a new wave dance club that was three-quarters empty. When "Garbageman" played, our drunken dance took up most of the dance floor. With Bryan Gregory, they played a place in Hamilton, Ontario that I always assumed was a money laundering joint because whoever booked it seemingly had no idea what he was doing, booking cover bands three nights a week and the Cramps in their most disturbing incarnation on the Friday. And I can't remember how many nights of drinking on the roof started with Songs the Lord Taught Us. Lux will be missed.

... and here's "Garbageman," from the days when videos weren't boring.

Bonnaroo Lineup

Here. After looking at this and the lineup for this year's Jazz Fest, can we officially call the jam band dead? Or at least in remission?

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band
Phish (2 Shows)
Beastie Boys
Nine Inch Nails
David Byrne
Wilco
Al Green
Snoop Dogg
Elvis Costello Solo
Erykah Badu
Paul Oakenfold
Ben Harper and Relentless7
The Mars Volta
TV on the Radio
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Gov't Mule
Andrew Bird
Band of Horses
Merle Haggard
MGMT
moe.
The Decemberists
Girl Talk
Bon Iver
Béla Fleck & Toumani Diabate
Rodrigo y Gabriela
Galactic
The Del McCoury Band
of Montreal
Allen Toussaint
Coheed and Cambria
Booker T & the DBTs
David Grisman Quintet
Lucinda Williams
Animal Collective
Gomez
Neko Case
Down
Jenny Lewis
Santogold
Robert Earl Keen
Citizen Cope
Femi Kuti and the Positive Force
The Ting Tings
Robyn Hitchcock & The Venus 3
Grace Potter and the Nocturnals
Kaki King
Grizzly Bear
King Sunny Adé
Okkervil River
St. Vincent
Zac Brown Band
Raphael Saadiq
Ted Leo and the Pharmacists
Crystal Castles
Tift Merritt
Brett Dennen
Mike Farris and the Roseland Rhythm Revue
Toubab Krewe
People Under the Stairs
Alejandro Escovedo
Vieux Farka Touré
Elvis Perkins In Dearland
Cherryholmes
Yeasayer
Todd Snider
Chairlift
Portugal. The Man.
The SteelDrivers
Midnite
The Knux
The Low Anthem
Delta Spirit
A.A. Bondy
The Lovell Sisters
Alberta Cross